To change the home site in SharePoint Online (Microsoft Learn): open the SharePoint Admin Center → click Settings → click the current Home site → paste the URL of your new home site → click Save. Changes take approximately 10 minutes to apply. Important prerequisite: the new home site must first be configured as the root site of your SharePoint environment. If it is not already the root site, you must replace the root site first (Admin Center → Sites → Active sites → select current root site → ellipses → Replace site). You must be a SharePoint Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator to make this change.
There are several scenarios that necessitate the change of the home Site in SharePoint Online. To properly change your SharePoint Online Home Site, we've created a tutorial below to walk you through the process so you can change the site properly. To start, the SharePoint Home Site is the landing page in which all users come first when they enter your organization’s SharePoint environment or intranet. It should have links to all important portals, resources, document libraries, conversations, news, and events in your organization. This makes it very important to plan and design your home site precisely. Before getting into how to change home site in SharePoint Online, let's first learn about how to prepare for the home site change.
According to Microsoft's official documentation, the SharePoint Home Site is the landing page for your entire SharePoint Online environment — the first page employees see when they navigate to your organization's SharePoint intranet. It functions as the organizational hub: housing links to news, events, important document libraries, key portals, and site navigation for the entire organization. Microsoft recommends designating a Communication Site as the home site because Communication Sites are designed for broad audiences with clean, visually engaging layouts.
Organizations change their home site for several reasons: a merger or reorganization requires a new intranet structure; the current home site was set up on a team site by default and needs to be moved to a proper Communication Site; or the organization is refreshing its intranet design with a new site build. Regardless of the reason, the process is the same - and it requires careful preparation to avoid breaking navigation or organizational-level features like Viva Connections.
Here are a few key things to consider prior to changing your home site.
Below, we will demonstrate how to reconfigure your root site.
Before making the change, audit the current home site for any custom navigation, web parts, or Viva Connections configuration that will need to be recreated on the new site. If the home site is connected to Viva Connections (the Teams intranet experience), changing it will reset the Viva Connections configuration - you will need to set it up again from the new home site. Document any custom mega-menus, promoted news links, or organizational assets stored on the current home site before the transition.
Before replacing the root site: Replacing the root site is a significant administrative operation. The existing root site is moved to a new URL (yoursite.sharepoint.com/sites/[oldname]) and the new site takes its place at the root. This process: (1) redirects the old root site URL to the new location, (2) preserves all content on the old site, and (3) may break any hardcoded links to the old root URL in documents, emails, or third-party integrations. Test in a non-production environment first if possible, and notify users of the change.
Some notes before we begin: When you configured Microsoft 365 for the first time, the root site for SharePoint is automatically set to a Communication site. The default URL will start with [your organization name].sharepoint.com. All global admins in your organization are owners of the site.
Complete the following steps to change the root site:
Now that you have set the new site as the root site, you can now change the home site. Let’s learn how to change the home site in SharePoint Online.
Note: it may take approximately 10 minutes for these changes to apply.
To ensure your success in changing your home site, it's imperative that you strategize and plan ahead for a seamless, precise site change. We have webinar below that covers the basics of SharePoint Communication Sites to provide you with more context on what to expect from these sites and how they can be employed as home sites.
Below is a tutorial video to support you in changing your home site in SharePoint.
Try out these facilities and add your queries and thoughts in the comment section below. Have a great day ahead!
This is a common issue with two main causes. First, ensure you are signed in with a Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator account - the Home site option is not visible to site collection administrators or other lesser roles. Second, the Home site option in Settings was updated with the introduction of SharePoint's new admin center experience (Microsoft Learn) - if you are using an older admin center view, try accessing the new admin center at admin.microsoft.com → SharePoint → Settings. If the option still does not appear, your Microsoft 365 tenant may need to be updated; contact Microsoft support to confirm that the Home Site feature is available for your subscription level.